Founding Backend Engineer

About the Role

Own the backend systems behind an AI assistant that communicates through text, email, and phone. As a hands-on founding engineer, you will design, build, and operate reliable infrastructure for message delivery, long-running agent tasks, and scheduled actions.

What You'll Do

• Design and operate messaging pipelines with reliable ordering, retries, and delivery across communication channels.

• Build an agent runtime for background tasks, managing concurrency, timeouts, cancellation, and recovery from model or tool failures.

• Implement scheduling for future actions, ensuring they run reliably and in the correct time zone.

• Plan capacity, load-test services, optimize databases, and address bottlenecks as systems scale.

• Manage data security and privacy, including credential encryption, Postgres schemas and migrations, and data deletion workflows.

• Build observability and tracing to track latency and costs across messages, models, and tools.

• Establish backend engineering practices and help recruit and mentor future team members.

What We're Looking For

• At least 4 years of software engineering experience, including substantial on-call ownership of production systems handling meaningful traffic.

• Deep experience with distributed systems, including queues, workers, retries, idempotency, and production failure modes.

• A track record of scaling systems through rapid growth and making sound decisions about what to address immediately.

• Production experience with Postgres, including schema design, migrations, and performance tuning, as well as cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code.

• Experience shipping production software in TypeScript or Python and building reliable messaging or event-driven systems.

• Experience with capacity planning, observability, distributed tracing, and measuring latency and costs.

• Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and the ability to verify and take ownership of generated code.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.